Published Friday, September 8, 2006, in the East Bay Business Times

Riders scarce, BART puts overnight service to bed

By David Goll

Dreams of all-night BART service have hit the snooze button again.

Revenue from riders during the overnight hours of Labor Day weekend
fell far short of BART's expenses, which will leave Caltrans holding
the bill.

Preliminary cost estimates of the service offered to graveyard shift
commuters and weekend revelers while the eastbound lanes of the San
Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge were closed from midnight Sept. 2 to 5
a.m. Sept. 5 are about $300,000.

Since only about 10,200 passengers rode during the hours BART is
usually closed - between midnight and 6 a.m. on Saturdays, midnight
and 8 a.m. Sundays - revenue came to only about $30,000.

BART spokesman Linton Johnson said the California Department of
Transportation will have to pay the difference of about $270,000,
because the limited overnight service was offered because Caltrans was
conducting earthquake retrofit work on the bridge's lower level.

"People like the idea of overnight service, but they just don't use
it," Johnson said.

Ridership for the entire three-day holiday weekend was up 13 percent
over previous Labor Day weekends, with a total of 539,400 passengers
riding BART. While those figures buoyed district officials, who make
60 percent of their revenue from the farebox, rider counts during the
overnight period were disappointing. Johnson described overnight
service as "a big money loser."

[BATN: Hey, just like running mid-day and evening trains to Pleasanton!]

The latest period compared unfavorably with previous overnight
service, most recently on the weekend of June 2 and 3, as well as
Oct. 15 and 16, 2005. On those nights, when work on the bridge was
also being conducted, 4,350 more passengers rode overnight in June as
compared with the Labor Day weekend, and 4,600 in October.

Johnson said the fact that last weekend was a holiday could have had
an effect, although daytime ridership figures were healthy.

Though periodic overnight service has been offered on occasion when
Bay Bridge traffic has been disrupted, the last sustained experiment
in this area occurred between April and July 1993, when BART offered
its "owl" service until 2 a.m.

In an era when ridership was well below today's weekday ridership
average of 330,000, an average of only 200 passengers a night rode the
trains between midnight and 2 a.m. Johnson said an average of 3,100
riders a night was needed to break even.

There is also a practical reason for trains to stop running for at
least a few hours between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. on weekdays. That's when
maintenance workers use a "rail grinder" to create a smoother ride and
less noise for passengers and nearby residents alike. It can only
cover 3,000 feet of the 104-mile system per night.

"Many people think train systems in places like Paris, London and
Washington, D.C., run all night, but they don't," Johnson said. "BART
actually operates longer hours than any of those. Even the New York
subways operate a limited service overnight."


dgoll@...
925-598-1436